By Joseph Brodsky

The English Poetic Translations, by Anna Polibina-Polansky

The Epigraph:

I made contents of jails.

To their greatest singer,

As I had grown there,

I offered my last cigar.

* * *

I'd not choose an exile sweet,

Nor a graveyard that dark.

The Vassilyevsky Island,

Greet my death with a spark.

You would not face my figure,

You would not meet my youth.

'Mong the lines getting bleaker,

Sidewalks, prompt me the truth!

Infatiguable souls

All make haste, at their route.

Bridges lurk 'gainst the coal

Of the sky, at the soot.

Haze, and long April drizzling,

And the snow from above.

And the voice I've been missing,

"So far, my sweet dove!"

Two existences there

I'll see, over the stream.

Oh my sweet land unfair,

I embrace you, my dream.

That is just like two sisters,

From the years unmet,

Run to that isle distant,

Weave me "bye", so upset.

Tr. 2010

I devote my translation to Vassily Slepov, my grategrandpa's brother and a legend of the Vassilyevsky Isle in Saint Petersburg, back in the 1950s.

* * *

At first, to abysses ther got the chair,

And next was the old steel bed.

And after them just, my table fair -

I pushed it there, for the best

I know. And then, my grammar book fell,

A picture with folks akin;

Four walls and our oven got to the hell.

I remained, with my coat up pinned.

Farewell, darling, take off the ring. To make fun,

Buy a magazine with robes crazed.

You can spit into the face of that one

Who will enter, to take my place.

* * * A Sonnet

Overlive all,

All anew, as it seems.

As if they give a call

Of wriggling snowy dreams.

Overlive the acute,

Not straightly, by some rib.

Tie up the knot crude:

'Tween nights and days, take a trip.

Outlast an instant,

Outlive years.

Screams break up mist blue,

Smiles grow into tears.

Break the poetry's crystal,

Outreach spheres.

Tr. 2010